The Playhouse will be the core of a new International University College, the first of its kind in the world focusing upon Shakespearean performance practice.

Students from across the world will be able to study and perform his work in the place where the man himself learnt his craft.

Shakespeare North has secured in principle the involvement and support of Liverpool John Moores University to play a major part in developing one-year MA and Diploma postgraduate programmes focusing upon Shakespearean stagecraft. The Playhouse will be at the heart of these courses.

With almost haunting prescience the playwright himself foresaw the creation of Shakespeare North. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, set in a deer park not dissimilar to the one at Knowsley, Ferdinand the King hopes to create:

… the wonder of the world
Our court shall be a little academe
Still and contemplative in living art (I.i.12)